Dell highly recommends applying this update as soon as possible. The update contains changes to improve the reliability and availability of your Dell system.

This BIOS release resolves the potential for unpredictable system behavior in Dell systems running Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor E7-2800/4800/8800 Series. For systems running Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor E7-2800/4800/8800 Series, Dell strongly recommends applying this critical update as soon as possible. Systems updated with this version of BIOS or newer and running Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor E7-2800/4800/8800 Series will be blocked from flashing to BIOS versions earlier than 2.7.0.

Update on April 19: I forgot about the M910, which I have added to the post.

You can use Dell OMSA, msinfo32.exe, or CPU-Z to discover the version of your main system BIOS. For example, Figure 1 shows the BIOS Version/Date of the little desktop system I am writing this on. Figure 2 shows the Mainboard tab of CPU-Z.

Figure 1: msinfo32.exe Output

Figure 2: CPU-Z Mainboard tab

If you discover that you are on an older version, I think you should strongly consider scheduling a maintenance window so that you can get this new version installed on your servers. Updating your main system BIOS will require a reboot of the system. If you have an HA solution in place, such as failover clustering, database mirroring, or SQL Server 2012 AlwaysOn Availability Groups, you can do a rolling upgrade to minimize your downtime.

easier said then done. it seems we are no longer able to just download the exe and simply install it. All of the recent dell updates simply quit on me while trying to update my systems. what is going on?

Are you sure you downloaded the right package. Most people use the “Update Package for Microsoft Windows” so they can start the BIOS updates from Windows. You also need the BIOS for the correct Dell model server.

I believe i did that. I have Dell 1950 PowerEdge server and got the latest PE1950_BIOS_WIN_2.7.0.EXE file as i did in the past. However when trying to run from the desktop a by clicking on Install button (and by the way the install button now has some funky strange characters appended at the end) Anyway clicking on install simply changes th ebutton to finished and that’s it. No bios upgrade for me